Hi all, In Fedora 31 I'll be disabling the snap plugin from GNOME Software. It's never been enabled in RHEL and so this change only affects Fedora. It's also not installed by default and so this change should only affect a few people. It's also not really a FutureFeature, it's a RemovalOfFeature but I'm happy to write something for the process and release notes if required. Recently Canonical decided that they are not going to be installing gnome-software in the next LTS, preferring instead to ship a "Snap Store by Canonical" rather than GNOME Software. The new Snap store will obviously not support Flatpaks (or packages, or even firmware updates for that matter). The developers currently assigned to work on gnome-software have been reassigned to work on Snap Store, and I'm not confident they'll be able to keep both the old and new codebases in the air at the same time. As you might know, enabling the snap plugin also enables the "Snap Store" which seemingly violates the same rules which prevent us installing Flathub by default (enabling access to nonfree software, and software with patent restrictions). Without the Snap Store the snap support is pretty useless, as snapd is so tied to the snapcraft ecosystem, and because you can't actually run your own instance of the snap store, unlike Flatpak. The existing snap plugin is not very well tested and I don't want to be the one responsible when it breaks. At the moment enabling the snap plugin causes the general UX of gnome-software to degrade, as all search queries are also routed through snapd rather than being handled in the same process. The design of snapd also means that packages just get updated behind gnome-software's back, and so it's very hard to do anything useful in the UI, or to make things like metered data work correctly. There's also still no sandboxing support years after it was promised, which means on Fedora running a snap is no more secure than "wget -O - URL | bash", again much unlike Flatpak. I appreciate this is going to be controversial, and that some people want snap support turned back on in GNOME Software. My answer there would be that I'm perfectly happy with someone creating a new gnome-software-snap top-level package (plugins in gnome-software are just runtime loaded .so objects, rather than all compiled together) and then they're responsible for keeping it up to date with any plugin ABI breaks in gnome-software upstream (usually once per GNOME cycle) and for any API or behaviour changes in snapd-glib. Basically, as long as it's not my email that gets pinged by bugzilla when it breaks it's fine. There was some suggestion that upstream we'd remove the snap plugin completely, but I think it will remain until we see if snap support improves or deteriorates further. Comments welcome, but anyone who insults me or insists I do more work than I'm doing now will be ignored. Richard. _______________________________________________ devel mailing list -- devel@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx To unsubscribe send an email to devel-leave@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx Fedora Code of Conduct: https://docs.fedoraproject.org/en-US/project/code-of-conduct/ List Guidelines: https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Mailing_list_guidelines List Archives: https://lists.fedoraproject.org/archives/list/devel@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
